DC Shooter Wanted to Kill as Many as Possible, Prosecutors Say

Terrorism is terrorism; excusing it or sympathizing with it does not make sense in a modern democratic society based on laws and reason. It is, was, and will always be flatly evil and plain wrong to bypass political process to achieve your ends through murder, assassination, intimidation, kidnapping, and torture of civilian groups or individuals. No justification for terror passes muster regardless of motive or cause.

Sympathizing with terror is also wrong, and making the victims somehow the perpetrators (as this alternet article does,) never flies. In this country we are free to hate, and in this country Floyd Corkins is a terrorist and he deserves the full weight of justice to fall upon him, just as every other terrorist does.

That doesn’t somehow turn the bigots at the Family Research Council into fleecy little lambs — their hate and bigotry makes them sympathizers, panderers, and enablers of a terror campaign of Gay Hate and Gay bashing that’s quietly gone on against the LGBT members of our communities for more than a century in this country.

You get to hate in this country - your speech is protected, but people do get to point out who the haters are. It’s a great system in that haters, bigots, and their favorite demagogues don’t have to hide in corners or talk in codes, they are easy for everyone to see and criticize.

It didn’t take the SPLC branding FRC and Tony Perkins a hate group for the majority of the populace to see the facts. Tony Perkins is a spotlight hog and publicity hound every bit as much as the Hate Church Westboro Baptist clan is. His message is only slightly more polished but really no different than theirs, and he has willfully usurped their spot as the number one gay hate group in the media. Trying to blame the SPLC for Corkins is futile with the general public, but bigots like Tony Perkins and Neoconfederate demagogue Robert Stacey McCain have to give it a try for their homophobic fans.

After years of thinking it over, Floyd Corkins finally had a plan.

He’d bought a gun and learned how to use it. He’d loaded three magazines. And he had stopped by Chick-fil-A to pick up 15 sandwiches, which he planned to smear in the dying faces of staffers he expected to kill at the Family Research Council in Washington.

It would be a statement, he said, “against the people who work in that building,” according to documents filed in U.S. District Court, where Corkins pleaded guilty on Wednesday to three charges related to the August shooting at the conservative policy group.

The shooting came amid intense debate over remarks against gay marriage by an executive with the Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A restaurant chain and the company’s support for groups considered hostile to gay rights.

The research council, a Christian group that focuses on family, anti-abortion and religious liberty issues and views homosexuality as harmful, backed Chick-fil-A in the ensuing controversy.

“They endorse Chick-fil-A and also Chick-fil-A came out against gay marriage, so I was going to use that as a statement,” prosecutors quoted Corkins as telling investigators.